Last night. The world was calm. I was grilling a steak for dinner. R. Girl was working late. The world was quiet. Children slept. Old men remembered battles and victories. Meat cooked. The world was still.

Ring. Ring.

"Hey, Mom, how's it going?"

"Well, OK, I just wanted to call ..."

"I'm making a steak."

"...becasue I wanted to let you know that ..."

"It's big."

"... last night I came to the decision that ..."

"Sizzle."

"... I was going to give the ring back to Newt."

"Oh, yeah? Why?"

"Well, it was all happening so fast and I was worried about his intentions."

"Gotta look out for yourself."

"Yeah, I'm better off."

"Yep, and my life is back to the way it was eight days ago. We all win!"

"I've actually already got a couple of dates set up for this weekend."

"I'm making a steak."

"Your mother rebounds really well, Brent."

"That's great!"

"One guy was asking me if I make really good spaghetti."

"Oh."

"I told him yes."

"Oh."

"He was like 'I mean really, really good spaghetti."

"Oh."

"I was like, 'Yes'."

"O.."

"He was like, 'I mean really, really good spaghetti."

"...h."

"I was like, 'Yes'."

I learned a lot about myself that night. I learned I could listen to my mom talk about her spaghetti for hours and that I could not eat a full pound of rare steak without getting a severe stomach ache. Most of all, I learned that losing a little piece of your innocence just means you're gaining a big piece of maturity.

I would never see that steak again. He went off to Vietnam and would be dead a year later.

Mom? She's now a full-time spaghetti cook. To this date she has made over 2,500 tons of spaghetti for the single men of Phoenix. They all claim it's "really, really, really, really, really good".

Newt's lotion business went bankrupt a few months later. All along he had just been putting sour cream in old toothpaste containers and passing it off as lotion. It turns out that one of his ten children, Lil' Sue, had an addiction to Mexican food condiments. She wiped out the entire family business during a Christmas Eve bender. Police described the scene as "The stupidest thing we've ever seen."

Hobo Bob went on to beat Slinky Boxcar in that shiv fight. Bums around the world would talk about the legend of Hobo Bob and his "Steel of Anger" for years.

And me, well, I went down to the tanning booth and later became a gorilla poacher.